Mindy, a month back, in my hotel room in Columbus, Ohio. This is the first I picked from the first roll of film and may be replaced by something later, but it's a pretty good picture of this beautiful 41-yr-old woman. I was visiting there and Dave Levingston suggested I photograph her.

Good advice. I'm not big on "diversity" in that I tend to photograph young, thin, attractive female models. Forty-one is pretty young when compared to my age, but that "...thin, attractive female..." part applies without qualification.

More pictures of Mindy and the others coming soon.

Man oh man do I have a ton of new stuff coming. I just developed four rolls of 120 film that include three of Mindy from Columbus, Ohio, and one of the very pregnant BonBon taken with my bitty view camera. Each roll has ten frames, and of that I expect about two or three good images per roll. I've got another sixteen rolls of Lapis, Uma and Lindsay from last weekend and expect to shoot another four or five of Trish and Marriah this weekend up in Hollywood. Then two weeks later I'm flying to Newfoundland, Canada, to photograph Vanity. That will make something like 26 rolls of ten frames each or 260 images, or about 50-60 new images to show, almost all of which are genuine hotel room nudes, which is, after all, what this place is supposed to be about.

So I'm stoked about having a ton of new stuff, but bummed about having to develop it all. I can do up to four rolls at a time in a can, but due mostly to drying time I can only do about one can a day if I'm diligent. So I won't have everything developed when I shoot Trish and Marriah (this should be a kinky shoot, BTW) and may have it all developed by the time I fly north.

But it won't all be scanned. That's about an hour per image as I make the big ones first then derive the web-sized ones from those so I don't have to re-scan anything. This is all more than one work week shoehorned into three calendar weeks. Nope, it's not all gonna be here at once, but it's all gonna be here eventually.

Stay tuned for the new stuff. In the mean time here's another of Chantel shot last November in Winnipeg.

Back from Chicago. The cast of characters there included Uma von Diehl, Lapis, Dyanov, Melvin Moten, Lindsay Lee, and Rich Mohr, in various ways.

The flight out of Chicago was delayed due to a thunderstorm and Uma was scheduled to fly out about four hours after me - I haven't heard that she made it back to Dallas yet, but assume she's with her homeys (homies?) now. I expect to have some stories to tell in the next few days, the shooting, arguing, drinking, flirting, philosophizing...shit like that. I'm thinking of having a bunch of promotional t-shirts made that say "I got off with D. Brian Nelson." It was that interesting.

Model here is BonBon, the woman that delivered the 9 1/2 pound baby girl a week ago. This was shot two years back or so in the warehouse adjoining my studio. Nice butt.

This is Ashley. But I'm sure most of you knew that already.

Well, Uma's getting dressed (boo), but we're going over to Lapis' place where she and Lapis intend to strip down to facilitate erudite conversation.

Do I have a good life or what?

EDIT: OK, I know this post was lacking content. No philosophy, no techie stuff. No personal tidbits about the girls or the scenes or amateur sociology. But sometimes you just gotta write what's on your mind. And sometimes my mind isn't on philosophy, but on naked chicks.

Well, I'm here in Chicago finally, checked into a hotel by the Midway Airport. Uma, the girl in this picture, is taking a shower while I'm typing this. While I only saw a flash, she looks every bit as good as she did in the last shoot back in January.

Looking forward to photographing her and two other models (mixing and matching) and meeting up with three or four shooters in the next three days.

It's all good.

I know Ashley still checks this blog to see how high her picture count gets. Pretty damned high actually. It was a productive shoot back in that Winnipeg motel last November. Crunchy cold it was. Reminded me of the North Dakota cold I escaped by way of the Marine Corps 34 years ago. Cozy in that room however.

I still have undeveloped film from the shoot with Mindy about three weeks back. Sorry, Mindy. Been travelling and not finished yet. Looking forward to seeing it, but I'm just not caught up yet. This coming weekend will push the bow wave higher with three more models lined up in Chicago. Then two in L.A. the following weekend. Then one in Newfoundland a week later.

Then I stop for awhile, catch up, catch my breath, and decide what's next. Something I read in Umberto Eco's book On Literature has me thinking about medieval light, but I haven't actually figured out what that means yet. Or I may break out the view camera and go shoot seascapes and landscapes and cityscapes and such. Just dunno yet.

HELLO CHINA! I see that this blog is being read in China via an anonymizer and am happy to know that. Keep an eye open for DCPhoto (or Photo) magazine, as a bunch of my pictures should be showing up there soon. Though I won't know what's said as I don't read Mandarin, so feel free to let me know in a comment when it happens, OK? (Philippe must be that single Shanghai reader I see once in awhile.)

Hmmm, who is this? Crystal. I photographed her once for a magazine submittal that went nowhere. Shot in San Diego in a boutique called UnUn. I think it was April of '02, but am not certain. Lots of nice clothes there, but as you know, I'm not keen on clothes anyway.

Alison is an actor. I don't often do "damsel-in-distress" pictures as I don't like them. But she wanted one so here it is. There's another (B&W) of her in her undies down below that I like much better. Huntsville, Alabama, motel several years back.

In other news it's obvious exactly when Indie moved the link to here from the top section to the next section down (next to my other photo websites) as traffic dropped by about 67%. I want this blog to keep rolling on its merits, so having folks seek it out, bookmark it or subscribe to an RSS feed is better than an easy link for those out nudie-surfing (not that I don't do that too), but I will miss the traffic. Last check Alexa had the blog ranked 165,858th on the web. I expect it'll drop to around 800,000th without that traffic, but some will come back with the publication of the DC Photo feature. Then the visitors will be Chinese mostly. I think most of the individual draw has to do with the narrative, so we'll have to see if that readership sticks.

The model that I referred to as a "princess" dropped me a line today questioning that description. Until I meet her, I'll persist.

Hey! Another guest photographer. This is Rich Mohr from Chicago of Curves Project fame. Another guy I've talked with, but never met - but will in about a week.
____________

You gotta love college girls! I was looking for candidates for the “Curves” project when Bee sent me a message through one of the model/photographer websites I belong to. She goes to a local college here in Chicago and like many students, struggling to make ends meet. She needed some headshots and I needed a fresh figure for the project so we decided to meet up on a lazy Saturday morning.

So here I am getting the place ready and I figured I could use a daylight bulb as it was a bit overcast outside. Crash! I accidentally tripped over my own light stand and single handedly took out my lighting for the shoot. As I was cleaning up the glass I heard footsteps in the hall, Bee was here.

Well luck was on my side I guess because after 10 minutes of small talk and watching her apply make-up, I noticed a break in the clouds and the sun was blazing through!

Quickly I grabbed Bee (not literally!) and got her into position. After about 14 frames the natural light was gone again, grrr! Now I was forced to use the remaining tungsten light I had with me. With no other good quality source, I used it and we finished the shoot.

Upon looking at the images many hours later, I found this gem. There were a few other images that I thought were pretty good but I didn’t include them here. This one is my favorite of Bee.

Not much processing on this image just a simple conversion to black and white, add a bit of grain and that’s it. Not sure why I tend to lean towards the black and white images. Maybe it has something to do with the notion that artistic nudes look better in the absence of color.

Would you guess that this 19 year old is a dominatrix? I never knew that until she opened her bag and pulled out a whip, which she seriously wanted to use on me! Whips and other devices like that are not strangers to me but that’s another story for another time…

- Rich Mohr

This is Dani, one of my favorite models ever, photographed in her bedroom in L.A. back in 2001. She was wearing that t-shirt around the house. I think I had the Pentax LX with some Tri-X film and had to push it to about ASA 3200, resulting in that gritty, grainy texture. Anyway, she dropped her drawers (she was probably running around in her panties anyway) and we made about three decent pictures. This one, of course, emphasizes the t-shirt and the way her head is posed she almost looks ashamed of it. I'll show some others from that shooot another time.

I've done nothing useful today, except starting to get back on West Coast time. Gotta make a hotel reservation tomorrow for Chicago next weekend. That's going to be fun. Models will be Lapis, Uma, Linsay and maybe another, and Melvin Moten, a photographer friend I've never met. In addition I'll be meeting Rich Mohr, another guy I've known for awhile without meeting.

Then back to North Carolina for a few days. Then in June the big trip to Newfoundland to photograph a princess. Sigh...

The ubiquitous Angela Ryan photographed in Dallas in December 2001 in the apartment of a friend of hers. The nipples match the lips and hair - a very deliberate effect. The light was very warm and could have been PhotoShopped or filtered to correct, but the color adds something and in corrected form the photograph isn't interesting. I also wasn't keen on the location and wished we could have shot in my hotel room for better lighting and more room. Oh well, live and learn. I have more of her including some B&W bondage and may post additional pictures someday.

Edit: That's lipstick on her nipples.

Chloe's taking a smoke break outside my studio in September 2002. She was wearing that coat in her left arm. Contrast is too high, and that may be a function of the scan rather than the film, but it's not likely I'll rescan that neg anytime soon.

I picked up "Umberto Eco on Linterature" at Books-a-Million in New Bern last week. I've enjoyed several of his books and thought these essays would be interesting. Mostly they were apologia, but they served an additional function of pointing me to the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, an author that shouldn't be overlooked by any Western reader. He is the master of meta-commentary and self-reference, and his stories peel open like onions in only a few pages. The stories are constructed so that each word is necessary and none is superfluous. I wish I could make photographs like he writes short stories, with each detail important and none extraneous. Right now I'm in the middle of his collection titled "Labyrinths."

Motives, method and philosophy. First let's clear up the obvious - yes, I'm a voyeur. I don't think that's an unusual trait in a photographer. Especially those of us that mostly photograph members of whatever gender appeals.

Method is probably more interesting. Except for those "post-modernists" that put a camera somewhere relatively random and program it to expose at relatively random intervals, the rest of us choose where the camera will be and when it will expose and therefore show a lot of ourselves in those choices. A photograph is prima facia evidence that a photographer was present and that there was interaction of some sort between the subject and the artist. I don't try to deny that in my pictures, but more or less make a point of the interaction, and when possible invite the viewer to take my place vicariously.

Philosophy just seemed to fill out the triumverate of the title. Though others have vested my stuff with philosophy of various sorts, mostly my own is that the models in my photographs are human beings and should be shown as such, rather than as inanimate objects or graphic designs or meat. If anyone ever writes about my work after I'm dead I'd love to see what they'd have to say, though that's both unlikely (former) and impossible (latter).

P.S. (Sorry Trish.) This is Trish. See her link off to the right. More of her after our next shoot in early June.

Back when I photographed Uma in Arlington, Texas, in January, near the end of the shoot she wanted to put on these thigh-highs and other lingerie. I'm not keen on lingerie, but she'd made some great photographs. So I photographed her doing her thing but thought it would be nice to have her put a finger in her butt. So she did. I'll be photographing Uma again in about a week, but don't look for pictures for awhile, as that hard drive crash has me way behind schedule.

Pretty soon I get on the airplane and go home to San Diego. I wanna see my cat again and ride my spiffy motorcycles!

I have absolutely nothing to say today, but as I haven't shown a new picture for a bit, it was time to post. I'm still in a hotel in North Carolina, but the job here is finished so tomorrow I'll go climb on a V-22 Osprey aircraft and probably eat too much for dinner. I must gain 12 pounds every trip, and as I only lose about 8 between trips it's not a good trend.

Looking forward to getting home and riding the Z1000 a little and eating at familiar cafes and even going in to the office on Monday. As of that Friday I'm off to Chicago to photograph several lovely women, plus drinking with and lying to a photographer friend that I've never met face-to-face.

This model is Ashley wearing my motorcycle jacket. I think I have the same picture without the jacket, but I like this so you're gonna have to look at it. Motel in Imperial Beach, California a few months back. Great model! Also a great jacket.

"No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." - Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.

"Mannerism" in Wilde's usage means a distinct style or trait, rather than the Italian school of art. All artists have mannerisms. Though the work I've shown here has quite a bit of range, there are enough things in common that the photographs can usually be attributed to me fairly easily. It's the term "unacceptable" that's puzzling. Unacceptable to whom? Is distasteful the same as unacceptable? And most specifically, what does "ethical sympathy" mean?

Ethics, unlike morality, is universal and absolute. Is "ethical sympathy" a choosing of sides? Does Wilde mean that an artist must not make artistic decisions based on ethics?

There are artists who "have a message." Usually those artists who are trying to say something specific don't make anything profound. But examples such as Salgado counter the argument.

Or maybe not. Salgado has a message and it defines all of his work. The message and style are equivalent. He is trying to make the world better. But Wilde also said "All art is useless." If Salgado's work is useful, is it art?

Perhaps Wilde's quote at the beginning is simply license to ignore ethics in making art. But that doesn't seem right either. I'll have to think about this some more.

(The model is Myra, photographed in my hotel room in Kiel, Germany.)

Visited the Wright Brothers' Museum in Kitty Hawk (Outer Banks, North Carolina) with a collegue yesterday. Kill Devil Hill is only a lump of sand, but it kicked my ass. Lotta walking. Gotta get back into some kind of shape. We all know getting out of shape is only caused by flaws of character. Sigh.

Chantel (with rings on fingers) and Ashley (with fingers on neck). I think the tension caused my the hand on the neck - that proprietary gesture - was pretty good. Otherwise, this isn't a great photograph. Buuuut...I haven't been home long enough to scan or even develop the newest work and will get home for only a few days before the Chicago trip where I'll be exposing a whole lot of new film with at least three really hot models. Ahem...I'm an artist...what I meant was "three really fine models."

Reading a lot lately. I'm a fan of Umberto Eco and picked up "Umberto Eco On Literature" down at the Books-A-Million here in New Bern a few days back. The very first essay on Dante's Paradisio gave me something to think about doing photographically. The style I mentioned in the last post. In the mean time I've decided to book no more models until I've had a chance to think about how to make that work.

Linda Tran dropped by the studio sometime in 2000, on her way to a beach in Baja, as I recall. We did a little work in the studio under hotlights. That's sweat folks. This photograph got enough attention that other models were asking me to shoot something similar with them and I've attempted it once or twice, usually using baby oil, rather than heat. I think there's a sweaty-looking picture of Robin (the tall blonde, not the short brunette) down below somewhere in one of my first attempts to use baby oil.

I'm in a hotel room in coastal North Carolina right now. Since the hard drive crash I haven't been able to rescan any of my new work. This has impacted me two ways: I don't have anything really fresh to show here, and; the submission for the Hong Kong magazine will be primarily older work as well. I would rather have shown the newer work in that magazine, but much of the newer work exceeds their standards of decency anyway, so it's probably just as well.

I have several photoshoots booked through June, but after than will likely not be accepting any new work. I've about run the course of the intimate hotel room genre and will be considering where to go next. One possiblility is to work in color with flat shadowless lighting and a longer lens to see if I can get a medieval flavor to the photographs. Of course, now that I've mentioned it here, photographs like that will probably start showing up everywhere...

As with the last photograph, this uses clutter and mirrors to give context. Emaile in an old hotel in Boulder City, Nevada. I talked about the shoot itself back in February, but probably didn't mention using the bedsheets to tie her to the bedposts. Well, I won't talk about that yet either. Another day perhaps, after I've gotten my hard drive loaded and can get the scanner working with PS and get the film from my last shoot of Mindy in Columbus, Ohio, developed and scanned. And rescan the lost recent photographs. Shit.

I've got to head into the office today to drop off some hardware and try once again to catch up on (dayjob) email before I fly out tomorrow for North Carolina. One piece of brilliant news is that it appears that two beautiful girls that I sorta know from my favorite haute cuisine brunch place here in SD seem eager to get naked and photographed together. Or maybe they want to be together for the comfort of not being alone with a weird old guy. Whatever...it's always better when you aren't photographing someone cold - when there's some history and prior knowledge.

As there was with Emalie, too.

Getting my hard drive loaded back up is a pain. I've got a bunch of pix that were stored on CD and have downloaded everything I have on my websites, but lost the recent large image files and will have to rescan them, once I can get PS to work with the scanner driver. Right now opening the driver kills PS, so I'm doing something wrong.

And there's all the updates my virgin OS needs and FireFox and trying to locate the SMTP server to send mail (I'm pretty much sticking with HotMail until that gets sorted) and so on.

In the mean time - don't know if I've mentioned it - I'm using some of my older color stuff for that Hong Kong photography mag that's doing the feature. Everyone likes the old stuff - this is one of those common knowledge things artists are supposed to know. No one wants the latest, only the stuff that's been around long enough to be accepted. Think of Peter Max's second phase work; you couldn't sell that for fishwrap after everyone got used to his hallucinogenic (Yellow Submarine) pop art.

This is Molly again. The story of the SoBe shoot is way below somewhere. I liked looking at her from three angles. Gonna visit Molly and her hubby when I ride through South Dakota next.

Today in Columbus I visited the Easton Mall, and the included Barnes & Noble bookstore, and noticed in philosophy (one stack vs. six stacks for Christian stuff) a book called The Parallax View (Short Circuits) by Slajov Zizek, a professor of philosophy at Ljubljana University in Slovenia. It got my attention because a) I have a friend doing her PhD there in philosophy, and; b) the observation that the universe is different depending on where one stands to look at it has been gnawing at me lately.

My family (mother & siblings) are devout Christians and I'm not. What the universe is to them has nothing at all to do with the universe I live in. And while that is, for me, the most obvious case, it's also true that the universe of any New Yorker will be different than that of any San Diegan. Following this to its logical conclusion the universe is different for each individual. The old question of whether strawberries taste the same to everyone can never be answered.

So...how does this apply to photography and why are you bringing it up at all, you ask? It's a troubling answer I think. A photographer limits the physical perspective and reach of a photograph by where the lens is, what lens it is, other techie shit and by the framing of the photograph. This forces all who look at the photograph to see the view through one of my eyes. Nevertheless, it's certain that even shown exactly the same view through the photograph, viewers see different things.

That picture above shows a young woman masturbating (Chantel in Winnipeg last November). Most would agree with that. There may be enough clues to place the scene in a hotel room. Beyond that cultural factors start kicking in and judgements as to the morality of masturbating, possible invasion of privacy, possible uses or intentions of the photograph are made, and each viewer makes them. And I believe viewers each make different judgements because each viewer lives in a different universe.

The truth is, only I know what was really happening there and I'm not telling. And if I did tell, it would be influenced by my own view of the universe and could not even be communicated to those with radically different universes.

See what happens when I'm left alone in a bookstore.

I also met Chip Willis (see his guest appearance below) and Ferhat, another fine photographer, ate Turkish food and talked for hours. When Ferhat moves away from his fashion work long enough to photograph a nude woman in a hotel room, I'd be delighted to show it here.

Hard drive's fragged and I won't be back for about a week. Lost the pix I hadn't backed up - the latest ones - and of course all my email. Not the end of the world as I use film so it's all really backed up, but it does mean a bit of rescanning coming up.

Talk to you all later.

-Don